Covid-19 Conundrum in Rome: More Homeless on Streets as Shelters Shrink - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/world/europe/covid-homeless-rome.html
For years, Pietro, 66, who asked that his last name not be used because he was ashamed of being homeless, eked out a living as an unofficial parking valet at a hospital. But his income dried up last March after the hospital restricted visitors. He spent 10 months sleeping at Termini Station, before finding a spot at the San Calisto church. Sleeping at the station, alongside hundreds of other homeless, “was frightening,” he said.Another guest at San Calisto, Antonino, 61, ran out of money after losing his job last year and ended up on the street. After three months living under a bridge, he found refuge at the St. Egidio shelter, where he feels secure. “They’ll never send us back out on the streets,” he said. Ms. Diodati of the Rome Red Cross said her groups had seen an increase in women on the streets, mainly because of the drop in shelter beds, though the numbers remained considerably lower than those of men. “Normally women tend to find hospitality,” she said.
On a recent Sunday, Maria, a Ukrainian woman who used to work as a cleaner, picked up a lunch bag offered by St. Egidio after a Mass. “People are afraid to hire me because I have to take public transportation” and risk exposure to the virus, she said.“We’re coming across people who only arrived on the streets a few months ago,” said Massimiliano Signifredi, a volunteer with St. Egidio. Each January and February, St. Egidio celebrates special Masses commemorating the homeless people who have died on the streets, including Modesta Valenti, who became something of an icon when she died in 1983 after an ambulance refused to transport her.
Over the past year, the number of homeless people has “clearly increased,” Mr. Signifredi said. with a housing crisis adding to the problem, even though the government made evictions illegal during the state of emergency. “We have said that the pandemic unleashed the poverty of the penultimate — those who barely made it to the end of the month and now can’t make it to the 10th, so they come to us or Caritas,” he said.
St. Egidio has opened several new dormitories and also drafted an agreement with a hotel whose rooms had been empty since the pandemic began. But it’s not enough. “We’ve asked authorities to react more quickly to emergencies,” because the emergency was not going away anytime soon, he said.“The kind of poverty has changed,” said Claudio Campani, a coordinator of the Forum for Street Volunteers, an umbrella group for some 50 associations that assist Rome’s homeless. “Now you have the so-called ‘new poor’ who go to live in their cars before ending up on the street.” And while many homeless people are immigrants, “the number of Italians has increased,” he said.“The thread that binds us to normality is so fine that it can take very little — loss of work, a weakness, a separation — for that thread to break and for us to fall and lose our life story and roots,” he said.
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